The Pride of Parahumans (18 page)

Well over ten minutes later, the docking
clamps let loose and the thrusters started up, moving us slowly
away from Vesta. It took more than an hour after that before we
were far enough away to start up the fusion torch drive. Then I
felt the familiar rush of acceleration as we went into burn. At
that point I decided it was time to head back to my cabin. I let
myself loose and grabbed onto the ladder that had just sprung out
of the floor, letting myself down to the "floor" that was a wall
just a couple hours ago. I climbed down until I got to the crew
deck and got off. They were oriented so that acceleration would act
like gravity. My cabin was all the way down at the end of a
hallway. I was able to simply walk down. Maximus was already
there.

"You have any trouble finding the place?" I
asked him as I sat down next to him.

"One of the self-appointed security guys
tried to tell me I was in the wrong section," Maximus started. "But
then one of the other crew told him that I was your boy toy or
something. He let me go right away."

I groaned as I leaned back, "I'll need to
talk to the crew about a lot of things. Like not holding up launch
an extra fifteen minutes crowding the bridge just so they can hear
me make a speech I wasn't expecting to make."

"It's weird, isn't it, this treatment like
you're some kind of revolutionary leader when all you did was
rediscover a gene?" He leaned back to match my eye level. "I've
been reading some more of the
Discourses
and on the specific
government that they primarily talk about."

"Really now. Why don't you tell me about
it?"

"Well, it's about Rome, which was a republic
for almost five hundred years before they elected a dictator named
Julius Caesar, who turned it into an empire that conquered most of
Europe and northern Africa and reigned for another four hundred
years before it split…"

***

We were about a week out when the first signs
of trouble appeared. A news report from Vesta stated that a
warehouse at the spaceport had exploded. Jakob Griggs was blaming
"Reproducers" or whatever the current term they were using for our
"movement" was. I called a meeting with the captains of the various
ships of the fleet via secure laser-line communications.

An entire wall of my cabin was composed of a
massive LCD monitor. I set it to display the images of every other
influential person in our improvised fleet. My own image would be
transmitted via a tiny camera embedded just above the monitor for
everyone else to see.

I addressed Denal specifically: "I think it's
time you told everyone what you found."

Denal shrugged and looked to Olga nervously,
as if waiting for her approval. She nodded. He turned back to the
camera and let out a long breath before speaking. "A few days
before we left, I found cutting charges attached to various points
along the superstructure of our freighter. I removed them and left
them in one of the warehouses at the dock." He slumped forward in
his seat. "I honestly expected them to find those things long
ago."

Objections and complaints erupted from the
other captains: "Why did you keep this secret?!" "What did you
think was going to happen?!" "That was the signal damn it!"

"Wait, what was that?" I called out at the
last statement. I noticed that one of the captains, a weasel or
something, had disappeared, leaving a blank screen with just the
words "signal lost" in the place of his image. "Where did he
go?"

"Oh shit!" Harvey exclaimed. "The
Defiant
just broke laser-line contact and jettisoned their
habitat modules."

I opened an intercom to the bridge crew.
"Send me a feed of the sensor read-outs to my monitor."

In seconds, the images of the other captains
were replaced with a radar map with labeled dots indicating the
ships of the fleet and other nearby objects. One dot, labeled
"Defiant," was racing towards the freighter.

"Give me all readouts! I was a prospector,
you know. Direct deep penetrating radar and radiation sensors at
the
Defiant!
"

As I watched the display, fuzzy clouds of
different colors and densities, indicating types and intensities of
radiation, appeared around the ships of the fleet. Most of the
ships had a faint cloud of red for infrared tinted with some gamma
green if their reactors had faulty containment. A window opened,
showing the mass profile of the
Defiant
. It was a fairly
standard, medium-sized transport, though the hull around the cargo
bay was unusually dense; that was typically the lightest armored
part of a ship, given how there were rarely any living organisms
transported in those compartments.

I didn't have long to wonder about that
unusual design before the reason became apparent, and violently. A
pair of panels on the front of the cargo compartment flew off and a
couple of very fast-moving green dots shot out. The nuclear
missiles locked onto a pair of ships that lay between us and the
Defiant
. One ship managed to shoot down the missile after
it. The other was not so lucky. There was a multicolored burst on
the radiation scanners, and the ship was simply gone.

"Get a message off to the rest of the fleet!"
I ordered.

"We can't!" was the strained reply. "There's
too much interference from the radiation!"

"Damn, damn, damn!" I said to myself. We had
minimal weapons and no way to signal the other ships to fire upon
the aggressor.

But slowly, the others seemed to get the
idea. They poured their point-defense weapons onto the
Defiant
.

Unfortunately, it seemed to do nothing. They
were apparently much better armored than the pirate we had seen off
Ceres.

One ship, Denal and Olga's, even launched a
missile. I did not know they had installed a missile launcher, but
I was a bit relieved, until their missile flew past the
Defiant
while that ship fired its own missiles at our
freighter. Were they working for Jakob too?

But then the missile fired by Olga and Denal
arced between the
Defiant
and its own missiles. There was a
flash, and when the scanners were clear again, the
Defiant
's
fore was partially melted and scarred as if by a barrage of lasers,
and its missiles were tumbling out of control.

"What the hell was that?!" I shouted.

"I think it was an x-ray laser warhead," said
one of the bridge crew. "They're often used to intercept missiles,
but they're expensive. Where would they get one of those?"

We didn't have much time to speculate, as the
Defiant
began to accelerate straight forward, on an impact
course with us.

"Move us out of the way! Shoot them down! Do
something!" I commanded.

The ship bucked to one side as the thrusters
kicked in and then pushed me down into the flight couch as the
fusion torch went full throttle. On the screen, I watched as our
coilguns loosed volley after volley of slugs into them. But still
the mutinous vessel careened onward. Ten kilometers, seven
kilometers, four kilometers, two kilometers, half a kilometer…

And then it went straight past us. The
cameras and coilguns rotated to follow the
Defiant,
but
before they could do anything more, it exploded. Debris flew
outwards from the blast, but our coilguns knocked the larger chunks
out of our way.

"What," I gasped, "was that?!"

"The lasers must have taken out their
sensors," suggested someone on the bridge. "Not sure why they blew
up, though. I didn't think we hit them that hard."

"Suicide attackers," I said. What had Jakob
offered them to inspire such loyalty? What did he have that would
be any good to them when they were dead? Clones? Assurance of their
genetic immortality? We would have to do something about that.

As we passed out of the radiation cloud, the
scanners began to pick up the rest of the fleet. What I saw stunned
me: There was a dogfight going on at the far side of the formation.
Or rather, three ships were firing upon a fourth that was trying to
weave between their shots. I grabbed at the icon for the ship being
pursued, and an information tag came up.

It was Denal and Olga's ship.

I spoke into the intercom again. "Do we have
communications back?"

"Half of the radio frequencies are clear
again. Do you wish to speak to someone?"

"Yes. Message to all ships: This is Argentum;
cease fire immediately! I repeat: Cease fire!"

The message had been out for less than a
minute before the bridge crew came calling back. "Receiving
response."

"Let's hear it."

"Not all the traitors are dead. You may have
missed it, but this one launched a nuke in your direction."

"Send response: I did see the laser warhead
that destroyed the
Defiant's
nukes and blinded them so that
their attempt at ramming failed. Stand down. We will handle
this."

Grudgingly, the three aggressor ships broke
off their pursuit. I radioed Denal and Olga to ascertain their
well-being.

"Hey, Silver, the hull was a little pitted
but I don't think we sustained any major damage." Denal's voice
said over the radio channel. I let out a small sigh of relief.

But then I heard some faint chattering coming
over the band, like someone else on his ship was speaking to him.
"What? Are you sure? Oh no. Oh no. Get someone out there to check
for survivors! Oh, sorry, this is still on. One of our exterior
habitat modules was ruptured."

I swear I could hear the joints in my cyborg
hand start to crack.

Chapter
18

Two months had passed since the incident with
the
Defiant
. We had continued despite our losses and were
now in orbit over our prize, 2 Pallas. It hung below us, a cratered
orb so like the one our group had fled so recently, two in my and
Denal's case. But since it lacked the sprawling surface factories
and spaceports that covered the surfaces of Ceres and Vesta, the
only detectable signs of habitation here were the skeletal remains
of abandoned mining camps. The survey probes indicated that the
planetoid's carbonaceous resources were largely untouched, but the
life-giving ice had largely been mined out. We ended up picking a
spot far from most of the mining sites, low in metals, but we could
send ships to gather them. The plans for the settlement were drawn
up, landing sequences were organized, and then they just stood
there.

I looked around the bridge from my chair in
the center of the room. Everyone was staring at me. Maximus Griggs
leaned over and whispered in my ear. "They're waiting hon."

I waved him away and stared directly at the
center of the main viewscreen. "Go ahead," I told the fleet. "You
all know the plan. You can begin landing."

The mining ships that could actually land on
the surface of an asteroid without a docking cradle began firing
retro-rockets to bring their habitat modules down to Pallas. There
they would detach and drill anchors into the surface. Once the
craft had lifted off again, people in the habitats would start
stringing up crawl tubes between the modules. As more modules were
brought down to the surface, the settlement would be laid down in a
spiral pattern, with each habitat connected to its immediate
neighbors in the same "arm" and adjacent ones. A bit of a hassle to
move from one end of the colony to another, but it would do until
we'd excavated a cave underground.

"Finally, it's all over," I said as I slumped
down in my chair. "Just asteroid mining from now on. I can handle
that."

"I wouldn't be too sure about that," the cat
by my side told me. "There's so much that needs to be done. We are,
after all, building a whole civilization out here."

"And you and Olga seem to have a better idea
of how civilizations should be run than I do," I told Maximus.

"And you expect them to follow us? I'm the
clone of their worst enemy, and she's the progeny of one of his
cronies. You, on the other hand they seem to adore as their
savior."

"Do you think I want to be worshipped? I'd
much rather go back to shining light at powdered rocks."

He drew himself towards me, sprawling over my
lap and looking up at me with those pleading wide eyes. "There's
nearly four thousand people out there. What's stopping another
demagogue like my father from taking over? They're used to anarchic
feudalism. What if another tragedy like that one just a few weeks
ago occurs? So many deaths that you could help us prevent."

"All right, all right!" I groaned, shoving
him off and getting up. "Fine, I'll be your king or queen or
messiah or whatever." I pointed at him with most of the fingers on
my right hand, still having difficulty selectively extending them.
"Just promise me that the instant you no longer need me, I can go
back to the rock crushing."

Maximus Griggs struggled to right himself in
the virtually nil gravity. Once he was done, he stood up as
straight as possible. "I promise."

You know, I never did get back to that
spectrophotometer.